


there's a million, billion, trillion stars

by thedreaming



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Family Member Death, Gen, Introspection, angus has just been through a lot, between the end of rockport limited and the end of petals to the metal, but as a whole this is NOT supposed to be overly sad, just a fair warning for discussion of family death in the beginning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:47:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27562519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedreaming/pseuds/thedreaming
Summary: "Over and over again, Angus McDonald would return to that one question: What am I really looking for?At the train station in Neverwinter, dusty with dirt and missing two teeth, Angus looked down at three silver forks clutched in his left hand, and he wondered."How the world’s greatest (boy) detective found his way to the organization hidden from the eyes of the world.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	there's a million, billion, trillion stars

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sure this has been done many times over, but this was born from me thinking about and then getting sad about how angus might have ended up at the Bureau on his own
> 
> (title from infinitesimal by mother mother)

Angus McDonald was the world’s greatest detective. Not just the greatest boy detective, but _the_ greatest detective. Period. End of story. (Or beginning of story, as some like to say). 

It’s unsurprising, then, that Angus McDonald, world’s greatest detective, liked to ask questions. To himself, to others, to the expanse of the planar universe. And over and over again, Angus McDonald would return to that one question: What am I _really_ looking for?

At the train station in Neverwinter, dusty with dirt and missing two teeth, Angus looked down at three silver forks clutched in his left hand, and he wondered. 

...

The path from the train station to the western entrance of Neverwinter was beautiful, a fixture of Angus’s life for as long as he could remember. 

In theory, there didn’t need to be much of a path– you could hop off of the train, onto the platform, and drag your luggage directly onto a bustling city street. Or, you could emerge from a long tunnel parallel to one of the train tracks, standing a ways outside the city and in a sprawling field. As fond of Angus normally was of seeking out the fastest route, this was the one time he always took the long way around. The path curled around the city walls, navigating through fields with Neverwinter as a backdrop as it made its way slowly to the other side of the city, the residential area where Angus’s grandpa lived. 

The path seemed so directly in contrast to the cacophony of the city, and when Angus walked outside the walls, he sometimes felt as though someone had cast a silencing spell bubbling around Neverwinter, trapping all the noise inside. Or maybe, the silencing spell was on him, and his ears were blocked from everything but the whistle of wind through grass and the overlapping chirping of bugs. Angus loved it. 

Rain or shine, Angus walked the road outside of Neverwinter. It was probably quite a good thing that over the years he had so worn his footsteps into the path of his mind, because he liked to use the trip, this one moment of self-granted stasis, to stew in his thoughts. 

He felt the beginnings of a classic murder board forming. All of the little things from his trip aboard the Rockport Limited that were just strange enough to set off an itch in the back of his mind, to hit on that love for mystery. And frankly, there were plenty of things that were not “just strange” but flat out inconceivable. Inconsistencies in his very understanding of the universe. Words that were not just left unsaid but themselves unheard. There was something there, Angus knew. 

In the way he loved to do, Angus laid out the clues. _(A reminder: Good detective work requires that you obtain as much information about the case as you possibly can.)_

First, the static. 

Sometimes when they spoke, nothing would come out. Or, not nothing, but a sound like a foggy memory or a burned-out brain too tired from studying facts of a case. Early in the trip, before all of the murdering, of course, Angus had made a brief attempt to understand why the trio seemed to have some block on communication with him. They seemed to imply that their bracers were somehow blocking communication, and yet, that fit only roughly into what Angus knew about them so far, like trying to shove a square block into a circle hole. Angus had more questions– obviously he had more questions– but he got a little wrapped up in the murder that occurred mere minutes afterwards, and didn’t have time for any interrogation.

Clearly, the trio could understand each other. Clearly, too, they were only being blocked from saying specific words. Angus tried to read their lips once, when they were having a conversation as though they had forgotten he was in the room. But every time he tried, his eyes would blur, as though he briefly couldn’t remember the reason he was supposed to be concentrating. They were not being blocked from talking; Angus was being blocked from understanding. Even more so, it seemed like the trio were somehow the only ones exempt from this regulation on reality– the other passengers aboard the train had raised eyebrows when they heard those crackling whispers. Therefore, ( _just a theory_ , supplied Angus’s mind), it could be assumed that something was done _to_ them to free them from constraints that applied to everyone else on the train, at the least. A magic spell, perhaps, but it was hard to know the cure when you literally couldn’t fathom the source, the origin of blocked knowledge.

Second, the treasure. 

Angus knew it was a monocle. Angus _saw_ a monocle. A monocle, a monocle, a monocle. Angus repeated the word in the back of his mind, as far back as he could push it, since when he thought too deeply about the why and how of it, he could feel tendrils creeping into his mind to take it away. Not to take the word away, just the understanding of its significance. If that was the static creeping into his mind, better now at least to be slightly in the dark. To possess just a few facts, so that he could piece them together quietly, without them getting fogged over. And so as he repeated the word, he only tacked on a couple additional points of description: Significant. Dangerous. 

Third, _them_. 

Taako, Magnus, Merle. The three of them were in a part of some organization– they had told him as much. Another thing that Angus could not understand was the shifting, ambiguous symbol on their bracers. He guessed those were some marker of who they worked for, because they didn’t seem quite the type for matching friendship bracers, at least not ones that they didn’t seem to be able to take off. 

Clearly, the three of them were looking for that thing _(a monocle, a monocle),_ and were doing so in a manner that suggested they were being at least _somewhat_ purposeful in their actions. Not a lot, but for all of their messing around Angus could at least tell that this was not the first time they had been on this kind of mission (though it might have been the second).

And yet. Despite Angus’s strange fondness for the three of them, he had to admit that it was kind of unconvincing that the three of them were really professionals. What kind of organization would hire them for what was clearly an important position? What kind of management was there? Still, it was possible that a special organization needed special talents.

Putting aside the excitement of a real and extremely secret organization right under his nose, Angus couldn’t help but feel like there was something off about the trio themselves. They were incredibly powerful, but barely acknowledged it. Driven by some unspeakable goal, but also prone to goofing off and antagonizing everyone they met. Very fond of each other, but also like strangers. There were pairs upon pairs of opposing facts that seemed, for all purposes, to contradict each other.

Again, Angus felt that itching feeling, the itching to know, to see, to be a part of something. More than that, _something_ out there in the world was keeping information from Angus, hiding it away. He would have to do something about that because, frankly, the absence of knowledge kind of went against Angus’s whole deal.

For now, though, Angus gathered up most of the thoughts ricocheting like tiny bouncy balls around his brain, and pushed them into a little box in the back of his mind, where hopefully they would be safe. Later, he thought. A mystery, an adventure for later.

As the sun moved across the sky and he walked on, the city grew in scale and size until it was no longer a ripple bunching up in the distance but towering buildings and a bustling metropolis. Angus stood still for a moment and closed his eyes, savoring a last moment of quiet before the bubble of silence broke and the world came rushing back in. 

Then, like always, he opened his wide eyes again and raced down the hill towards a city that had clues hidden within it and secrets to find and a grandpa to see.

...

Angus had little time to grieve. His grandpa’s death was not unexpected– as with every single person on the planet, he rationalized, it was expected sooner or later. The rationalization didn’t help. He wasn’t a stranger to loss, but no level of a boy detective’s logic would be enough to lessen that hurt. He had been coming to Neverwinter in part to see his grandpa, and he cursed the sheer inevitability, the nothing-he-could-do about simply running out of time. 

The numb shock Angus felt when he arrived at his grandpa’s house, having walked all the way from the train station only to be met with a somber but altogether empty and unimportant face at the front door, rendered him passive and blank. 

To an outsider, one who didn’t know the depth of love in this kid’s heart, it might have appeared uncaring. 

He was too late. Too late to say goodbye, too late to spend one last day together in the library. Angus took comfort in one thing, though: his grandpa knew how much he cared. His grandpa _knew that_ and as much as he had to scrunch up his nose against tears at the thought of not being able to say goodbye, there was no revelation of family and love that Angus held back on sharing. Angus did a whole show and tell routine of love every time he saw his grandpa, and that fact would never go away. 

If there was anything to regret and to miss, it would be the little things. The days in the library, the trips to magic shows. Memories that he would hold close to his chest with love for the rest of his life. But in the back of his mind, he would always wish for one more. 

_A reminder: To be the best detective you can be, you must look with eyes turned to the future._

Angus would always have a place to stay at the house, he was told. That mattered very little to him. He spent a long day with people he was told were relatives, but who have had no place in his life in any way that he can recall. 

He heard the whispers, people who were older and therefore think they know better talking about him, his parents, his grandpa. About how he was not so much allowed to go wherever he wanted as he had no one to tell him otherwise. 

_For someone so young, to have lost so much,_ they said.

Sure, Angus didn’t know these people, but he really did try to be a friendly person. He was not so foolish as to not understand what they’re saying, but he was kind and smart and frankly, just a lovable sweetheart. So he made small talk and not-so-small talk and he accepted condolences with a “Thank you, sir!” and he met new people. 

And Angus remembered. 

He remembered a day in his grandpa’s library. Just the two of them in Angus’s favorite place in the world. There was an entire section of Caleb Cleveland novels, one carefully cultivated by Angus and his grandpa. Truly, if he were to buy every single one of the Caleb Cleveland novels, in all of their different editions, they would be enough to fill a library on their own. They must have gone through numbers of ghostwriters, or else there was one person behind it all and they were very good at churning out mysteries at an unreasonable rate. 

Every time Angus visited the library, the Caleb Cleveland section had grown just a little more, encroaching on the shelves and swallowing other books to make more room. And so every time Angus visited the library, observed the expansion, he laughed out loud and smiled widely, taking just a second to bask in the marvel of always having something new to read. 

“What are you looking for, Angus?”

Angus looked over his shoulder from where he was poking through the library stacks to grin at his grandpa, sitting comfortably in one of the soft armchairs in the sitting area. He had a mug of steaming tea cupped in his hands that was beginning to fog up the bottoms of his reading glasses.

Angus held up a tiny, decorative magnifying glass that was attached with a ribbon to the cover of one of the more fancy editions of _Caleb Cleveland and the Vault of the Universe._ He looked through the lens at his grandpa, closing his other eye in a wink. “Nothing but the truth, grandpa!”

His grandpa smiled at the joke, wrinkles bunching up to frame his dark eyes. “Why don’t you grab a book and come sit with me for a while?”

Angus tugged on the ribbon of the magnifying glass until the book toppled off the shelf and into his hands, before taking a couple steps and launching himself into one of the waiting chairs. 

“Hey, grandpa,” Angus said, slinging his feet over the armrest so he was curled up sideways in the chair. “What do you think came first, the detective or the truth?”

His grandpa looked at him thoughtfully, and Angus loved that look, that expression that he knew meant his grandpa was taking him seriously. Angus knew it was kind of a silly question– it barely made sense, and sounded like a riddle. Even when Angus asked him riddles, he rarely took them at face value. But Angus didn’t care. Half of his conversations with his grandpa started with a question, any question, because his grandpa had a gift for spinning threads of knowledge and understanding even out of nonsense. 

“Well,” his grandpa started, picking his way carefully through the beginnings of a thought.“Why don’t you tell me what you mean by that? Which do you think came first?”  
And sometimes there was this: for part of the weaving of knowledge to involve Angus coming upon it for himself.

“I was wondering,” Angus began, “If the truth comes before the person seeking it. You know, is there one Truth with a capital T, or is there something else to it?”

“Well, I say I’d think a lot of people would answer that question quite differently.”

“But how would _you?_ ” Angus prodded, smiling. 

“I’d say that there are true things, and then there is truth. There is a way to spell ‘aarakocra’ that is true–”

“A-A-R-A-K-O-C-R-A,” Angus recited, unable to stop himself.

“Ah, so I see someone’s been studying.”

“Sorry, sorry. Sorry for interrupting!” Angus waved a hand quickly at his grandpa to continue. 

“No need at all to apologize, Angus. That was quite good.” Angus’s grandpa nodded, seeming pleased. “So, I would say, putting those true things aside, that truth is a personal thing. Personal truths give your life meaning.”

“So I guess you would say the detective came first, huh?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Well, I’ve always been good at solving mysteries and cracking clues.” Angus considered, “But I think that only counts as regular truth.”

“Yes, I think that would fall under _things that are true._ But that doesn’t mean you aren’t working towards something bigger.” His grandpa looked at him fondly. “Angus McDonald, you have always wanted to see the world as it really is. You’re always seeking the truth, even if it is that first kind. And I think, eventually, you can learn to search for that second kind of truth along with the first.”

“But how?”

“You know that’s not something I can answer for you. Also, I know you don’t like to be reminded of this, but you’re still _very_ young. You have time and time enough to figure it out for yourself.”

Angus hummed in response and his grandpa patted him on the head. He knew his grandpa was right, that he still had so much time, but enough time never felt like enough. Angus wanted to jump up and run around the world until he found _something,_ some beginning of some answer.

“Still.” And Angus looked up at the word to see his grandpa spreading his arms wide, gesturing to the library, to the Caleb Cleveland books. “There’s a reason I keep buying all of these books. Something tells me that purpose of yours might be somewhere within those pages– in the skills you get from them, I mean.”

“What, so I can learn to detective well enough to see through horseshit?”

“Angus.” His grandpa shot him a stern look.

“Sorry!” He chirped, but his smile didn’t dim and he didn’t look at all apologetic.

“What I’m saying is, your life will have meaning because _you_ seek it out, but there are places to look for help if you need it, too.”

“Won’t the meaning just find me?” He asks, just to poke the conversation onwards.

“That’s enough for some” He looked at Angus closely. “But not for you, I think. And I think your life will be made all the better for you being able to find that truth yourself. Just as there are those true things, there are things that are untrue. And that means there is always more to discover. I think you’ll be a great person to find it.” 

“Thank you, grandpa,” Angus said quietly.

“You love questions. It’s one of the best things about you, and I won’t pat myself on the back so much to say you got it all from me, but I’d like to think I helped.” He tapped Angus on the forehead and added, “Always keep asking yourself those questions. And you can always return to that one question and let its meaning change with you, even if its answer is something you can’t put to words.”

“Which question?”

“Well, let me ask you again.”

_What are you looking for, Angus?_

Angus blinked out of the memory, and he was kneeling at his grandfather’s grave. Alone. It was nearing nightfall in Neverwinter, beams of light struggling to push through the branches of trees, soon to disappear. He stacked stones on the top of the grave, and placed the three forks down against fresh earth. 

“I’m looking for…. I’m looking for….” He sighed and stood up.

Before he turned to go, he looked out past his grandfather’s grave towards the dimming horizon line. He took a deep breath, and whispered out into the evening, “I am going to find that truth. I am going to prove my grandpa _right._ ”

...

Seven days later, Angus left.

His reason for coming to Neverwinter was only as a continuation of the case on the Rockport Limited, and then to see his grandfather. He had other cases to take, other places to be. 

So once again, Angus hopped on a train. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! :)
> 
> i have a general idea of where i want this to go but school is very busy so it could take me quite a while to get around to it- but who knows!


End file.
